Introduction: The path to the nomination

In the summer of 2006, Patti Solis Doyle offered David Axelrod a job. Hillary Clinton was running for reelection to the Senate and Solis Doyle was her campaign manager, but everybody knew Clinton was soon going to run for president. And Clinton wanted Axelrod onboard.

Axelrod was a highly experienced and successful political consultant and just what Clinton needed. But he declined. Presidential campaigns were mentally taxing, physically exhausting and emotionally draining. There were easier ways to make a buck.

Story Continued Below

Unless. “I wasn’t planning to work in a presidential race,” Axelrod told me, “but if Barack might run, well, he would be the only guy to cause me to get in.”

It was not impossible. As early as November 2004, even before his swearing-in to the United States Senate, Barack Obama was having conversations about the possibility of a presidential run in 2008.

The conversations were very preliminary, however, just a toe in the water. And Hillary Clinton was not worried.

In May 2006, Clinton herself had interviewed another experienced campaign consultant, Steve Hildebrand, but had turned him down. The time was not right. And she had plenty of time. But it would prove to be a costly mistake. A few months later, Steve Hildebrand would play a key role in persuading Barack Obama to run for president.

Hillary still was not worried. She would put together a great campaign team, a Dream Team. It did not turn out that way. “Happy families are alike,” Leo Tolstoy famously wrote. “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Hillary Clinton campaign was an unhappy family. I was told by Clinton campaign staffers that Mike Henry, the deputy campaign manager, stalked Clinton headquarters in Ballston, Va., with a baseball bat in his hand. I was told that Patti Solis Doyle stayed in her office watching soap operas and refused to return the phone calls of governors, members of Congress and Bill Clinton. I was told that there were suspicions that Mark Penn, the campaign’s pollster and chief strategist, “cooked the books” in presenting his polling results. (All denied the accusations.) It was that kind of campaign.

In the very beginning, the Obama campaign felt it would have to do everything right in order to beat Clinton. The mere thought of running against her was intimidating. “We thought we had to be almost a perfect campaign to win,” David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, told me, “because she was so strong.” The Obama campaign would not turn out to be a perfect campaign, of course. No campaign is. But it didn’t need to be.

See Also: Roger Simon's Relentless Series

Months after Hillary Clinton announced in January 2007 that she was running for president, her campaign was still disorganized, inept and, in a word used over and over again by her top campaign aides, “dysfunctional.” One of those aides said: “I don’t think we knew what a political operation was. It was the weakest I have ever experienced. It was dismally weak.”

The campaign would improve as time went by, becoming more coherent, better planned and much less arrogant. But by the time it improved, it was already too late. Barack Obama had wrapped up the nomination, cleverly, skillfully, relentlessly. Always relentlessly.

Both campaigns made mistakes. But whenever Obama suffered a setback, he always had a Plan B ready, waiting and often already under way. “It was a game of chess, and we thought methodically,” said Axelrod, who would become Obama’s top strategist. “We took a pawn here and there.” In the end, it would be enough. In the end, the pawns would create a king.

Presidential campaigns have grown so vast and complex, with so many moving — and sometimes clashing — parts that few candidates feel they are actually in control. But, in the end, they are responsible.